Gotcha! font tcrm1000 not found

On my debian systems, I was consistently getting the error message
"font tcrm1000 not found" and similar when trying to use, e.g.,
the \dag command in LaTeX. The error would show up when using
dvipdf, which doesn't do much in the way of logging.

In the name of protecting users, I offer the following advice:
the problem is that dvipdf needs to call metafont the first time
you do this. Metafont needs to write to /var/spool/texmf. But in
general, users are not afforded write access there.
Warning! what I'm going to suggest is almost
certainly a security violation. But it does work! I issued the
command (as root) chmod -R a+rwx /var/spool/texmf
which fixed the problem for good.